This year's Pulitzers

I once heard it said that in England, journalists turn to drink, and in America they turn to awards. Actually, journalists used to drink in America, and quite heavily, until the Evian-and-stairmaster age, but it is true that Americans love their awards, and so out comes Columbia University today with this year's Pulitzer prizes, America's most prestigious. Yes, shut out again.

They're kind of mysterious, the Pulitzers. You can know who's on the committee if that's of interest to you, but the announcement of the awards themselves is rather strange. Two or three years ago, I think it was, I happened to be having dinner with a Pulitzer winner the very night he snagged his prize. He said no one called him to say he was a finalist, no one alerted him to the fact that he was in the running. He just had to check the web site, like everyone else. It was posted some time after 3 pm, and there his name was.

My reactions are fairly predictable. David Leonhardt of the NY Times for commentary is fantastic. That guy should never be missed. Just always smart.

I'm somewhat less enthused about the prize that went to The Wall Street Journal's Joseph Rago for some editorials (leaders) on Obama's healthcare plan. I consider life too short for me to have spent one second reading a Wall Street Journal editorial on healthcare reform, but I cant imagine they were remotely reality-based.

Oh, all right. Here's one from December 2009, you remember, when the Democratic Senate was on the verge of "ramming" the bill down America's throat overnight (eight months, during which Senate Republicans voluntarily walked away from negotiations and Chuck Grassley started tweeting about killing grandma). It's a long one.

I won't refute it point by point, which would take 3,000 words. It and I disagree, let's just leave it at that. I can say this much about Wall Street Journal editorials in general. I once undertook a pretty rigorous study of American newspaper editorials. What I found was that the leading liberal editorial pages actually had a set of principles on certain issues (transparent government, let's say) that they applied more or less equally to Republican and Democratic administrations. Thus, for example, the New York Times was about equally critical of both the Clinton and Bush administrations on secrecy in government issues, writing a similar number of editorials on each.

The conservative newspapers had a different principle: we crush Democratic administrations and make apologies for Republican ones. And so this self same Wall Street Journal editorial page, on the question of allegations about the secrecy shrouding Hillary Clinton's 1993-94 healthcare deliberations, pounded and pounded and pounded, demanding subpoenas and thumping its chest like an asylum patient. On the question of the allegations of secrecy surrounding Dick Cheney's energy-policy panels, the Journal joked that Democrats, now in the minority, didn't have anything better to do than pry around.

Maybe Brother Rago has brought a new level of disinterested professionalism to that page. If he has done so in the age of Murdoch, more power to him.